Future of an Illusion

By

SIGMUND FREUD

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STUDY BEYOND THE

PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS THE

COMPLETE

INTRODUCTORY

LECTURES ON PSYCHOANALYSIS

THE EGO AND THE ID THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION GROUP

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS OF THE EGO·

INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHOANALYSIS

J OKES

AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHOANALYSIS ON DREAMS ON THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT AN OUTLINE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS THE PROBLEM OF ANXIETY THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE THE

QUESTION

OF LAY ANALYSIS

TOTEM AND TABOO

The Future OF AN

Illusion SIGMUND FREUD Newly Translated from the German and Edited by JAMES STRACHEY

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NORTON & COMPANY · INC ·

Copyright © 1961 by James Strachey Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Freud, Sigmund, 18(;5-1939. The future of an illusion. Translation of Die Zukunft einer Illusion. Bibliography; p. Includes indexes. 1. Psychology, Religious. 2. Religion. 3. Psychoanalysis. I. Strachey, James. II. Title. 75 15645 200'.1'9 BL53.F67 1975 ISBN 0 393-01120-8 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

CONTENTS

Editor's Note

8

The Future of an Illusion

5

Bibliography and Author Index

57

General Index

61

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION

EDITOR'S NOTE DIE

ZUKUNFT EINER ILLUSION

(a) GERMAN EDITIONS: 1927 Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Pp. 91. 1928 2nd ed. Same publishers. (Unchanged.) Pp. 91. 1928 G.S., 11,411-66. 1948 G.W., 14, 325-380. (b) ENGLISH TRANSLATION: The Future of an Illusion 1928 London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho­ Analysis. Pp. 98. (Tr. W. D. Robson-Scott.) The present translation is based on that published in 1928.

This work was begun in the spring of 1927, it was finished by September and published in November of the same year. In the 'Postscript' which Freud added in 1935 to his Autobio­ graphical Study he remarked on 'a significant change' that had come about in his writings during the previous decade. 'My interest', he explained, 'after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking' (Standard Ed., 20, 72). He had, of course, touched several times on those problems in the intervening years-e specially in Totem and Taboo (1912-13);1 but it was with The Futur.e of an Illusion that he entered on the series of studies which were to be his major concern for the remainder of his life. Of these the most im­ portant were Civilization and its Discontents (1930a), which is the direct successor to the present work, the discussion of philoso­ phies of life which forms the last of the New Introductory Lectures

(1933a), WIv War? (1933b), Freud's open letter to Einstein, and 1 His earliest published approach to the problem of religion was in the paper on 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices' (19076) .

3

4

THE FUT U R E OF AN ILLUSION

finally Moses

and Monotheism (1939a),

which he worked at from

1934 onwards.

In view of Freud's sweeping pronouncement on p. 6 ('1 scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization') and of a similar remark towards the end of 'Why War?', i t seems un­

necessary to embark on the tiresome problem of the proper translation of the German word 'Kultur'. We have usually, but n ot invariably, chosen 'civilization' for the noun and 'cultural' for the adjective.

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION I

WHEN one has lived for quite a long time in a particular civilization1 and has often tried to discover what its origins wer e and along what path it has developed, one sometimes also feels tempted to take a glance in the other direction and to ask what further fate lies before it and what transformations it is destined to u ndergo. But one soon finds that the value of such an enquiry is diminished from the outset by several factors. Above all, because there are only a few people who can survey human activity in its full compass. Most people have been obliged to restrict themselves to a single, or a few, fields of it. But the less a man knows about the past and the p resent the more insecure must prove to be his judgement of the future. And there is the further difficulty that precisely in a judgement of this kind the subjective expectations of the individual playa part which it is difficult to assess; and these turn out to be dependent on purely personal factors in his own experience, on the greater or lesser optimism of his attitude to life, as it has been dictated for him by his temperament or by his success or failure. Finally, the curious fact makes itself felt that in general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put them­ selves at a distance from it-the present, that is to say, must

have become the past-before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future. Thus anyone who gives way to the temptation to deliver an

opinion on the probable future of our civilization will do well to remind himself of the difficulties I have just pointed out, as well as of the uncertainty that attaches quite generally to any prophecy. It follows from this, so far as I am concerned, that I

shall make a hasty retreat before a task that is too great, and shall promptly seek out the small tract of territory which has claimed my attention hitherto, as soon as I have determined its position in the general scheme of things. Human civilization, by which I mean all those respects in 1

[See Editor's Note, p. 4.] 5

6

THE FUTURE OF AN

I L LU S I O N

which human life has raised itself above its animal status and differs from the life of beasts-and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization-, presents, as we know, two aspects to the observer. It includes on the one hand all the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs, and, on the other hand, all the regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to one another and especially the distribution of the available wealth. The two trends of civilization are not independent of each other: firstly, because the mutual relations of men are profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible; secondly, because an individual man can himself come to function as wealth in relation to another one, in so far as the other person makes use of his capacity for work, or chooses him as a sexual object; and thirdly, moreover, because every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest.! It is remarkable that, little as men are able to exist in isolation, they should nevertheless feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices which civilization expects of them in order to make a communal life possi.ble. Thus civilization has to be defended against the individual, and its regulations, institu­ tions and commands are directed to that task. They aim not only at effecting a certain distribution of wealth but at main­ taining that distribution; indeed, they have to protect every­ thing that contributes to the conquest of nature and the production of wealth against men's hostile impulses. Human creations are easily destroyed, and science and technology, which have built them up, can also be used for their annihilation. One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. I t is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to 1 [The hostility of human individuals to civilization plays a large part in the earlier chapters of this work. Freud returned to the su bj ect and discussed it still more fully two years later in his Civilization and its Discontents (1930a).]

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLU S I O N

7

indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make stil greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be the golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to under­ take to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti­ cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behaviour in human society. This psychological fact has a decisive importance for our judgement of human civilization. Whereas we might at first think that its essence lies in controlling nature for the purpose of acquiring wealth and that the dangers which threaten it could be eliminated through a suitable distribution of that wealth among men, it now seems that the emphasis has moved over from the material to the mental. The decisive question is whether and to what extent it is possible to lessen the burden of the instinctual sacrifices imposed on men, to reconcile men to those which must necessarily remain and to provide a com­ pensation for them. It is just as impossible to do without control of the massl by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization. For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the indi­ viduals composing them support one another in giving free 1 ['Masse.' The German word has a very wide meaning. It is translated 'group' for special reasons in Freud's Group Psychology (1921,). See Standard Ed., 18, 69n. Here 'mass' seems more appropriate.]

8

THE F U TURE O F A N IL L U S ION

rein to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends. All is well if these leaders are persons who possess superior insight into the necessities of life and who have risen to the height of mastering their own instinctual wishes. But there is a danger that in order not to lose their influence they may give way to the mass more than it gives way to them, and it therefore seems necessary that they shall be independent of the mass by having means to power at their disposal. To put it briefly, there are two widespread human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the regulations of civilization can only be maintained by a certain degree of coercion­ namely, that men are not spontaneously fond of work and that arguments are of no avail against their passions. I know the objections which will be raised against these assertions. I t will be said that the characteristic of human masses depicted here, which is supposed to prove that coercion cannot be dispensed with in the work of civilization, is itself only the result of defects in the cultural regulations, owing to which men have become embittered, revengeful and inaccessible. New generations, who have been brought up in kindness and taught to have a high opinion of reason, and who have experienced the benefits of civilization at an early age, will have a different atti­ tude to it. They will feel it as a possession of their very own and will be ready for its sake to make the sacrifices as regards work and instinctual satisfaction that are necessary for its preserva­ tion. They will be able to do without coercion and will differ litde from their leaders. Hno culture has so far produced human masses of such a quality, it is because no culture has yet devised regulations which will influence men in this way, and in par­ ticular from childhood onwards. It may be doubted whether it is possible at all, or at any rate as yet, at the present stage of our control over nature, to set up cultural regulations of this kind. It may be asked where the number of superior, unswerving and disinterested leaders are to come from who are to act as educators of the future generations, and it may be alarming to think of the enormous amount of coercion that will inevitably be required before these intentions can be carried out. The grandeur of the plan and its importance

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLU S I O N

9

for the future of human civilization cannot be disputed. I t is securely based on the psychological discovery that man is equipped with the most varied instinctual dispositions, whose

ultimate course is determined by the experiehces of early child­ hood. But for the same reason the limitations of man's capacity for education set bounds to the effectiveness of such a trans­ formation in his culture. One may question whether, and in what degree, it would be possible for a diferent cultural en­ vironment to do away with the two characteristics of human masses which make the guidance of human affairs so difficult. The experiment has not yet been made. Probably a certain percentage of mankind (owing to a pathological disposition or an excess of instinctual strength) will always remain asocial;

but if it were feasible merely to reduce the majority that is hostile towards civilization to-day into a minority, a great deal would have been accomplished-perhaps � that can be accomplished. I should not like to give the impression that I have strayed a long way from the line laid down for my enquiry [po 5]. Let me therefore give an express assurance that I have not the

least intention of making judgements on the great experiment in civilization that is now in progress in the vast country �t stretches between Europe and Asia.l I have neither the special

knowledge nor the capacity to decide on its practicability, to test the expediency of the methods employed or to measure the width of the inevitable gap between intention and execution. What is in preparation there is unfinished and therefore eludes an investigation for which our own long-consolidated civilization affords us material.

1 [See, however, some remarks in Chapter V of Civilization and its Discontents (1930a), and at two points in Why War? (1933b) and a long discussion in the last of the New Introauctory Lectures (1933a).]

II

WE have slipped unawares out of the economic field into the field of psychology. At first we were tempted to look for the assets of civilization in the available wealth and in the regula­ tions for its distribution. But with the recognition that every civilization rests on a compulsion to work and a renl1nciation of instinct and therefore inevitably provokes opposition from those affected by these demands, it has become clear that civilization cannot consist principally or solely in wealth itself and the means of acquiring it and the arrangements for its distribution; for these things are threatened by the rebelliousness and destruc­ tive mania of the participants in civilization. Alongside of wealth we now come upon the means by which civilization can be defended-measures of coercion and other measures that are intended to reconcile men to it and to recompense them for their sacrifices. These latter may be described as the mental assets of civilization. For the sake of a uniform terminology we will describe the fact that an instinct cannot be satisfied as a 'frustration', the regu­ lation by which this frustration is established as a 'prohibition' and the condition which is produced by the prohibition as a 'privation'. The first step is to distinguish between privations which affect everyone and privations which do not affect every­ one but only groups, classes or even single individuals. The former are the earliest; with the prohibitions that established them, civilization-who knows how many thousands of years ago?-began to detach man from his primordial animal con­ dition. We have found to our surprise that these privations are still operative and still form the kernel of hostility to civilization. The instinctual wishes that suffer under them are born afresh with every child; there is a class of people, the neurotics, who already react to these frustrations with asocial behaviour. Among these instinctual wishes are those of incest, cannibalism and lust for killing. I t sounds strange to place alongside one another wishes which everyone seems united in repudiating and others about which there is so much lively dispute in our civilization as to whether they shall be permitted or frustrated; but psychologically it is justifiable to do so. Nor is the attitude 10

THE FUTURE OF AN I L L U S I O N

11

of civilization to these oldest instinctual wishes by any means uniform. Cannibalism alone seems to be universally proscribed and-to the non�psycho-analytic view-to have been com­ pletely surmounted. The strength of the incestuous wishes can still be detected behind the prohibition against them; and under certain conditions killing is stiU practised, and indeed commanded, by our civilization. It is possible that cultural developments lie ahead of us in which the satisfaction of yet other wishes, which are entirely permissible to-day, will appear just as unacceptable as cannibalism does now. These earliest instinctual renunciations already involve a psychological factor which remains important for all further instinctual renunciations as well. It is not true that the human mind has undergone no development since the earliest times and that, in contrast to the advances of science and technology, it is the same to-day as it was at the beginning of history. We can point out one of these mental advances at once. It is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion gradually becomes internalized; for a special mental

agency, man's super-ego, takes it over and includes it among

its commandments.l Every child presents this process of trans­ formation to us; only by that means does it become a moral and social being. Such a strengthening of the super-ego is a most precious cultural ass et in the psychological field. Those in whom i t has taken place are turned from being opponents of civiliza­ tion into being its vehicles. The greater their number is in a cultural u n it the more secure is its culture and the more it can dispense with external measures of coercion. Now the degree of this internalization differs greatly between the various in­ stinctual prohibitions. As regards the earliest cultural demands, which I have mentioned, the internalization seems to have been very extensively achieved, if we leave out of account the unwelcome exception of the neurotics. But the case is altered when we tum to the other instinctual claims. Here we observe with surprise and concern that a majority of people obey the cultural prohibitions on these points only under the pressure of external coercion-that is, only where that coercion can make itself effective arid so long as it is to be feared. This is also true of what are known as the moral demands of civilization, whi�h

1 [See Chapter III of The Ego and the Id (1923b), Standard Ed., 19, 28 ff.]

12

THE FUTURE OF AN

ILLUS I O N

likewise apply to everyone. Most of one's experiences of man's moral untrustworthiness fall into this category. There are count­ less civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest but who do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their avarice, their aggressive urges or their sexual lusts, and who do not hesitate to injure other people by lies, fraud and calumny, so long as they can remain unpunished for it; and this, no doubt, has always been so through many ages of civilization. If we turn to those restrictions that apply only to certain classes of society, we meet with a state of things which is flagrant and which h as always been recognized. It is to be expected that these underprivileged classes will envy the favoured ones their privileges and will do all they can to free themselves from their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible, a permanent measure of discontent will persist within the culture concerned and this can lead to dangerous revolts. If, however, a culture has not got b eyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion-and this is the case in all present­ day cultures-it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share. In such conditions an internaliza­ tion of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected. On the contrary, they are not prepared to acknowledge the prohibitions, they are intent on destroying the culture itself, and p ossibly even on doing away with the postulates on which it is based. The hostility of these classes to civilization is so obvious that it has caused the more latent hostility of the social strata that are better provided for to be overlooked. It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence. The extent to which a civilization's precepts have been internalized-to express it popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of its participants-is not the only form of mental wealth that comes into consideration in estimating a civilization's value. There are in addition its assets in the shape of ideals and artistic creations-that is, the satisfactions that can be derived from those sources.

13

THE FUTURE OF AN I L LUS I ON

People will be only too readily inclined to include

among the

psyc hical assets of a culture its id eals-its estimates of what

achievements are the highest and the most to be striven after. It will seem at first as though these ideals would determine the achievemen ts of the cultural unit; but the actual course of events would appear to be that the ideals are based

on the first

achievements which have been made possible by a combination of the culture' s internal gift s and external circumst ances , and

that these first achievements are then held on to by the ideal as something to be carried further. The satisfaction which the ideal offers to th e participants in the culture is thus of a nar­ cissistic nature; it rests on their pride in wha t has alread y been successfully achieved. To make this satisfactiop complete calls for a comparison with other cultures which have aimed at different achievements and have developed di fferent ideals. On

the strength of these differences every culture claims the right

to look down on the rest. In this way cultural ideals become a source of discord an d enmity between diferent cultural

units, as can be seen most clearly in the case of nations. The narcissistic satisfaction p rov ided by the c ul t ur al ideal is

also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within t he cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy

the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right t o despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; bu t , to make up for it, one is a Roman ci tizen, one has one's share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the suppressed classes with the class who rules and exploits them is, however, only part of a large r whole. For, on the other hand, the suppressed classes can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals; unless such relations of a funda­ m entally satisfying kind subsisted, it would be im poss ible to

u nderstand how a number of civilizations have survi ved so long in spite of the justifiable hostility of large human masses. A different kind of satisfaction is afforded by art to the par­

ticipants in a cultural unit, though as a rule it remains in­ accessible to the masses, who are en gaged in exhausting work and have not enjoyed any personal educa tion. As we

discovered

14

THE F UTURE O F A N I L L U S I O N

long since, 1 art offers substitutive satisfactions for the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations, and for that reason it serves as nothing else does to reconcile a man to the sacrifices he has made on behalf of civilization. On the other hand, the creations of art heighten his feelings of identification, of which every cultural unit stands in so much need , by pro­ viding an occasion for sharing highly valued emotional ex­ periences. And when those creations picture the achievements of his particular culture and bring to his mind its ideals in an impressive manner, they also minister to his narcissistic satisfaction. No mention has yet been made of what is perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization. This consists in its religious ideas in the widest sense-in other words (which will be justified later) in its illusions. 1

[C£., for

instance,

'Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming' (1908e).]

III

IN what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie? We have spoken of the hostility to civilization which is pro­ duced by the pressure that civilization exercises, the renuncia­ tions of instinct which it demands. If one imagines its prohibi­ tions lifted-if, then, one may take any woman one pleases as a sexual object, if one may without hesitation kill one ' s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in one's way, if, too, one can carry off any of the other man's belongings witho u t asking leave-how splendid, what a string of satisfactions one's life would be! True, one soon comes across the first di fficulty : everyone else has exactly the same wishes as I have and will treat me with no more consideration than I treat him. And so in reality only one person could be made unrestrictedly happy by such a removal of the restrictions of civilization, and he would be a tyrant, a dictator, who had seized al the means to power. And even he would have every reason to wish that the others would observe at least one cultural commandment: 'thou shalt not kill ' . But how ungrateful, how short- sighted after all, t o strive for the abolition of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature, and that would be far harder to b ear. I t i s true that nature would not demand any restrictions ofinstinct from us, she would let us do as we liked; but she has her own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us­ coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction. It was precisely because of these dangers with which nature threatens us that we came together and created civilization, which is also, among other things, intended to make our communal life possible. For the principal task of civiliz ation, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature. We all know that in many ways civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time goes on it will do it much better. But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished ; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subjected to man. There are the elements, which seem to mock at all human control : the earth, which quakes and is 15

16

T H E FUTURE

O F AN

I L LU S I O N

tom apart and buries al human life and its works ; water, which deluges and drowns everything in a turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recendy recognized as attacks by other organisms ; and finally there is the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be. With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable ; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization. One of the few gratifying and exalting impressions which man­ kind can offer is when, in the face of an elemental catastrophe, it forgets the discordancies of its civilization and all its internal difficulties and animosities, and recalls the great common task of preserving itself against the superior power of nature. For the individual, too, life is hard to bear, just as it is for mankind in general. The civilization in which he participates imposes some amount of privation on him, and other men bring him a measure of suffering, either in spite of the precepts of his civilization or because of its imperfections. To this are added the injuries which untamed nature-he calls it Fate-inflicts on him. One might suppose that this condition of things would result in a permanent state of anxious expectation in him and a severe injury to his natural narcissism. We know already how the individual reacts to the injuries which civilization and other men inflict on him: he develops a corresponding degree of re­ sistance to the regulations of civilization and of hostility to it. But how does he defend himself against the superior powers of nature, of Fate, which threaten him as they threaten all the rest? Civilization relieves him of this task ; it performs it in the same way for all alike; and it is noteworthy that in this almost all civilizations act alike. Civilization does not call a halt in the task of defending man against nature, it merely pursues it by other means. The task is a manifold one. Man's self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors; moreover his curiosity, moved, it is true, by the strongest practical interest, demands an answer. A great deal is already gained with the first step : the humani­ zation of nature. Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached ; they remain eternally remote . But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death

THE FUTURE OF AN

I L L U S I ON

17

itself is not somethi ng spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety. We are still defenceless, per­ ha ps, but we are no longer helplessly par alyse d; we can at least

react. Perhaps, indeed, we are not even defenceless. We can apply the same methods against these violent supermen outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of a part of their power. A replacement like this of natural science by psychology not only provides im.

mediate relief, but also points the way to a further mastering of the situation. For this situation is nothing new. It has an infantile prototype,

of which it is in fact only the continuation. For once before one

has found oneself in a similar state of helplessness: as a small child, in relation to one's parents. One had reason to fear them, and especially one's father; and yet one was sure of his pro­ te ction against the dangers one knew. Thus it was natural to assimilate the two situations. Here, too, wishing played its part, as it does in dre am-life. The sleeper may be seized with a pre­ sentiment of de ath, which threatens to place him in the grave.

But the dream-work knows how to select a condition that wil

turn even that dre ade d event into a wish-fulfilment: the dreamer sees himself in an 'ancient Etruscan grave which he has climbed down into, happy to find his archaeological interests satisfied.1

In the same way, a man makes the forces of nature not simply into persons with whom he can associate as he would with his equals-that would not do justice to the overpowering im­ pression which those forces make on him-but he gives them the cha r a cter of a father. He turns them into gods, following in

this, as I have tried to show, a not only an infantile prototype but a phylogenetic one. In the course of time the first observations were made of

regularity and conformity to law in natural phenomena, and with this the forces of nature lost their human traits. But man's 1 [This was an actual dream of Freud's, reported in Chapter VI (0) of Thelnterpretation cif Dreams (1900a), Starul4rd Ed., 5, 454-5.] I [See Section 6 of the fourth essay in Totem and Tahoo (1912-13), Standard Ed., 13, 146 if.]

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THE F U T U R E O F AN

ILL U S I O N

helplessness remains and along with i t his J.onging for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the c ruelty of Fate, p articularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them. But within these functions there is a gradual displacement of accent. It was observed that the phenomena of nature developed automatically according to internal necessities. Without doubt the gods were the lords of nature; they had arranged it to be as it was and now they could leave it to itself. Only occasionally, in what are known as miracles, did they intervene in its course, as though to make it plain that they had relinquished nothing of their original sphere of power. As regards the apportioning of destinies, an unpleasant suspicion persisted that the perplexity and helplessness of the human race could not be remedied. It was here that the gods were most apt to fail. If they themselves created Fate, then their counsels must be deemed inscrutable. The notion dawned on the most gifted people of antiquity that Moira [Fate] stood above the gods and that the gods them­ selves had their own destinies. And the more autonomous nature became and the more the gods withdrew from it, the more e arnestly were all expectations directed to the third function of the gods-the more did morality become their true domain. It now became the task of the gods to even out the defects and evils of civilization, to attend to the sufferings which men inflict on one another in their life together and to watch over the fulfilment of the precepts of civilization, which men obey so imperfectly. Those precepts themselves were credited with a divine origin ; they were elevated beyond human society and were extended to nature and the universe. And thus a store of ideas is created, born from man's need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race. It can clearly be seen that the possession of these ideas protects him in two directions-against the dangers of nature and Fate, and against the injuries that threaten him from human society itself. H ere is the gist of the matter. Life in this world serves a higher purpose; no doubt it is not easy to guess what that purpose is, but it certainly signifies a perfecting of man's nature. It is probably the spiritual part of

TH E

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OF AN I L LUSION

19

man, the soul, which in the course of time has so slowly and un¥lillingly detached itself from the b ody , that is the obj ect of this elevation and exaltation. Ev erything that h app ens in this world is an expression of the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in the end, thoug h its ways and byways are difficult to follow, orders everything for the best-that is, to mak e it e nj oyabl e for us. Over each one of us there watches a benevol en t Providence which is only se emingly stern and which will n ot suffer us to become a plaything of the over­ mighty and pi til ess forces of nature. Death itselfis not extinction, is not a return to inorga nic lifelessness, but the b egi nning of a new kind of existence which lies on the p ath of development to something higher. And, loo king in the other direction, this view announces that the same moral laws which our civiliza­ tions have set up govern the whole universe as well, except that they are maintained by a supreme court of justice with in­ comparably more power and c onsistency. In the end al good is rewarded and all evil punished, if not actually in this form of life then in the later existences that begin after death. In this way all the terrors, the sufferings and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated. Life after death, which continues life on earth just as the invisible part of the spectrum j oins on to the visible p art, brings us al th e perfection that we may p erh aps have missed here. And the superior wisdom which directs this course of things, the infinite goodness that expresses itself in it, the justice that achieves its aim in it-t hese are the attributes of the divine beings who also created us and the world as a whole, or rather, of the one divine be ing into which, in our civilization, all the gods of antiquity have been condensed. The people which first succeeded in thus concentrating the divine attributes was not a little proud of the advance. It had laid open to view the father who had all along been hidden behind every divine figure as its nucleus. Fundamentally this was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea of God. Now that God was a single person, m an's relations to him could recover the i nti m a cy and intensity of the child's relation to his father. But if one had done so much for one's father, one wante d to have a reward, or at least to be his only b elov ed child, his Chosen People. Very much later, pious America laid claim to being 'God's own Country' ; and, as regards one of the shapes in which men worship the deity, th e clai m is undo ubtedly valid.

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ILLUS I O N

The religious ideas that have been summarized above have of course passed through a long process of development and have

been adhered to in various phases by various civilizations. I have singled out one such phase, which roughly corresponds to the final form taken by our present-day white Christian civilization. It is easy to see that not all the parts of this picture tally equally well with one another, that not all the questions that press for an answer receive one, and that it is difficult to dismiss the contradiction of daily experience. Nevertheless, such as they are, those ideas-ideas which are religious in the widest sense- are prized as the most precious possession of civilization, as the most precious thing it has to offer its participants. It is far more highly prized than all the devices for winning treasures from the earth or providing men with sustenance or preventing their illnesses, and so forth. People feel that life would not be tolerable if they did not attach to these ideas the value that is claimed for them. And now the question arises : what are these ideas in the light of psychology? Whence do they derive the esteem in which they are held? And, to take a further timid step, what is their real worth?

IV AN enquiry which proceeds like a monologue, without interrup­

tion, is not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness. I shal there­ fore imagine that I have an opponent who follows my argu­ ments with mistrust, and here and there I shall alow him to inteIject some remarks.l I hear him say: 'You have repeatedly used the expressions "civilization creates these religious ideas", "civilization places them at the disposal of its participants". There is something about this that sounds strange to me. I cannot myself say why, but it does not sound so natural as it does to say that civilization has made rules about distributing the products of labour or about rights concerning women and children.' I think, all the same, that I am justified in expressing myself in this way. I have tried to show that religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature. To this a second motive was added-the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt. Moreover, it is especially apposite to say that civilization gives the individual these ideas, for he finds them there already; they are presented to him ready-made, and he would not be able to discover them for himself. What he is entering into is the heritage of many generations, and he takes it over as he does the multiplication table, geometry, and similar things. There is indeed a difference in this, but that diference lies elsewhere and I cannot examine it yet. The feeling of strangeness that you mention may be partly due to the fact that this body of religious ideas is usually put forward as a divine revelation. But this presentation of it is itself a part of the religious system, and it entirely ignores the 1 [Freud had adopted the same method of presentation in his recent discussion oflay analysis (1926e) and also, though in somewhat different circumstances, a quarter of a century earlier in his paper on 'Screen Memories' (1899a).]

21

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ILLUSION

known historical development of these ideas and their differences in different epochs and civilizations. ' Here is another point, which seems to me to be more impor­ tant. You argue that the humanization of nature is derived fro m the need to p u t an e n d t o man's perplexity and helplessness i n t h e face of its dreaded forces, t o get into a relation with them and finally to influence them. But a motive of this kind seems superfluous. Primitive man has no choice, he has no other way of thinking. It is natural to him, something innate, as it were, to proj ect his existence outwards into the world and to regard every event which he observes as the manifestation of beings who at bottom are like himself. It is his only method of com­ prehension. And it is by no means self-evident, on the contrary it is a remarkable coincidence, if by thus indulging his natural disposition he succeeds in satisfying one of his greatest needs . ' I d o n o t fi n d that s o striking. Do you suppose that human thought has no practical motives, that it is simply the expression of a disinterested curiosity? That is surely very improbable. I believe rather that when man personifies the forces of nature he is again following an infantile model. He has learnt from the persons in his earliest environment that the way to influence them is to establish a relation with them ; and so, later on, with the same end in view, he treats everything else that he comes across in the same way as he treated those persons. Thus I do not contradict your descriptive observation; it is in fact natural to man to personify everything that he wants to understand in order later to control it (psychical mastering as a preparation for physical mastering) ; but I provide in addition a motive and a genesis for this peculiarity of human thinking. 'And now here is yet a third point. You have dealt with the origin of religion once before, in your book Totem and Taboo [ 1 9 1 2- 1 3] . But there it appeared in a different light. Everything was the son-father relationship. God was the exalted father, and the longing for the father was the root of the need for religion. Since then, it seems, you have discovered the factor of human weakness and helplessness, to which indeed the chief role in the formation of religion is generally assigned, and now you transpose everything that was once the father complex into terms of helplessness. May I ask you to explain this trans­ formation? ' With pleasure. I was only waiting for this invitation. But is

T H E F U T U R E OF

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23

it really a transfQrmation? In Totem and Taboo i t was not my purpose to explain the origin of religions but only of totemism. Can you, from any of the views known to you, explain the fact that the first shape in which the protecting deity revealed itself to men should have been that of an animal, that there was a prohibition against killing and eating this animal and that nevertheless the solemn custom was to kill and eat it communally once a year? This is precisely what happens in totemism. And it is hardly to the purpose to argue about whether totemism ought to be called a r eligion. It has intimate connections with the later god-religions. The totem animals become the sacred animals of the gods; and the earliest, but most fundamental moral restrictions-the prohibitions against murder a nd incest -originate in totemism . Whether or not you accept the con­ clusions of Totem and Taboo, I hope you will admit that a number of very remarkable, disconnected facts are brought together in it into a consistent whole. The question of why in the long run the animal god did not suffice, and was replaced by a human one, was hardly touched on in Totem and Taboo, and other problems concerning the formation of religion were not mentioned in the book at al. Do you regard a limitation of that kind as the same thing as a denial? My work is a good example of the strict isolation of the particular contribution which psycho-analytic discussion can make to the solution of the problem of religion. If I am now trying to add the other, less deeply concealed part, you should not accuse me of contradicting myself, just as before you accused me of being one-sided. It is, of course, my duty to p oint out the connecting links between what I said earlier and what I put forWard now, between the deeper and the manifest motives, between the father-complex and man's helplessness and need for protection. These connections are not hard to find. They consist in the relation of the child's helplessness to the helplessness of the adult which continues it. So that, as was to be expected, the motives for the formation of religion which psycho-analysis re­ vealed now turn out to be the same as the infantile contribution to the manifest motives. Let us transport ourselves i nto the mental life of a child . You remember the choice of object according to the anaclitic [attachment] type, which psycho-analysis talks of?1 1

[See Freud's paper

on

narcissism ( 1 9 1 4c) , Standard Ed. , 14, 87.]

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The libido there follows the paths of narcissistic needs and attaches itself to the objects which ensure the satisfaction of those needs. In this way the mother, who satisfies the child's hunger, becomes its first love-object and certainly also its first protection against all the undefined dangers which threaten it in the external world-its first protection against anxiety, we may say. In this function [ of protection] the mother is soon replaced by the stronger father, who retains that position for the rest of childhood. But the child 's attitude to its father is coloured by a peculiar ambivalence. The father himself constitutes a danger for the child, perhaps because of its earlier relation to its mother. T hus it fears him no less than it longs for him and admires him. The indications of this ambivalence in the attitude to the father are deeply imprinted in every religion, as was shown in Totem ana Taboo. When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the f eatures belonging to the figure of his father ; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness. The defence against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult 's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge-a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion. But it is not my intention to enquire any further into the development of the idea of God ; wha t we are concerned with here is the finished body of religious ideas as it is transmitted by civilization to the individual.

v LET us now take up the thread of our enquiry.l What, then, is the psychological significance of religious ideas and under what heading are we to classify them? The question is not at al easy to answer immediately. Mter rejecting a number of formula­ tions, we will take our stand on the following one. Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself and which lay claim to one's belief. Since they give us information about what is most important and interesting to us in life, they are particularly highly prized. Anyone who knows nothing of them is very ignorant; and anyone who has added them to his knowledge may con­ sider himself much the richer. There are, of course, many such teachings about the most various things in the world. Every school lesson is full of them . Let us take geography. We are told that the town of Constance lies on the Bodensee. 2 A student song adds : 'if you don't believe it, go and see.' I happen to have been there and can confirm the fact that that lovely town lies on the shore of a wide stretch of water which all those who live round it call the Bodensee; arid I am now completely convinced of the correctness of this geographical assertion. In this connection I am reminded of another, very remarkable, experience. I was already a man of mature years when I stood for the first time on the hill of the Acropolis in Athens, between the temple ruins, looking out over the blue sea. A feeling of astonishment mingled with my joy. It seemed to say: 'So it really is true, just as we learnt at school ! ' How shallow and weak must have been the belief I then acquired in the real truth of what I heard, if I could be so astonished now ! But I will not lay too much stress on the significance of this experience ; for my astonishment could have had another explanation, which did not occur to me at the time and which is of a wholly subj ective nature and has to do with the special character of the place. 3 1 2 8

[From the end of Chapter III, p. 20.] [The German name for what we call the Lake of Constance.] [This had happened in 1904, when Freud waa almost fifty. He wrote 25

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All teachings like these, then, demand belief in their contents, but not without producing grounds for their claim. They are put forward as the epitomized result of a longer process of thought b ased on observation and certainly also on inferences. If anyone wants to go through this process himself instead of accepting its result, they show him how to set about it. More­ over, we are always in addition given the source of the know­ ledge conveyed by them, where that source is not self-evident, as it is in the case of geographical assertions. For instance, the e arth is shaped like a sphere ; the proofs adduced for this are Foucault's pendulum experiment,! the behaviour of the horizon and the possibility of circumnavigating the earth. Since it is impracticable, as everyone concerned realizes, to send every schoolchild on a voyage round the world, we are satisfied with letting what is taught at school be taken on trust; but we know that the p ath to acquiring a personal convi<:tion remains open. Let us try to apply the same test to the teachings of religion. When we ask on what their claim to be believed is founded, we are met with three answers, which harmonize remarkably badly with one another. Firstly, these teachings deserve to be believed because they were already believed by our primal ancestors ; secondly, we possess proofs which have been handed down to us from those same primaeval times ; and thirdly, it is forbidden to raise the question of their authentication at all. In former days anything so presumptuous was visited with the severest penalties, and even to-day society looks askance at any attempt to raise the question again. This third point is bound to rouse our strongest suspicions. After all, a prohibition like this can only be for one reason­ that society is very well aware of the insecurity of the claim it makes on behalf of its religious doctines. Otherwise it would certainly be very ready to put the necessary data at the disposal of anyone who wanted to arrive at conviction. This being so, it is with a feeling of mistrust which it is hard to allay that we pass on to an examination of the other two grounds of proof. We ought to believe because our forefathers believed. But these a full account of the episode in an open letter to Romain Rolland some ten years after the present work ( 1 936a) .] 1 [J. B. L. Foucault ( 1 8 1 9-68) demonstrated the diurnal motion of the earth by means of a pendulum in 1 85 1 .]

THE F U T U RE O F AN I L L U S I O N

27

ancestors o f ours were far more ignorant than w e are. They be lieve d in things we could not possibly accept to-day ; and the possibility occurs to us that the doctrines of religion may belong to that class too. The proofs they have left us are set down in writings which themselves bear every mark of untrustworthiness. They are full of contradictions, revisions and falsifications, and where they speak of factual confirmations they are themselves unconfirmed. I t does not help much to have it asserted that their wording, or even their content only, originates from divine revelation; for this asse rtion is itself one of the doctrines whose authenticity is under examination, and no proposition can be a proo f of itself. Thus we arrive at the sing ula r conclusion that of all the information p rovi de d by our cultural assets it i s pre cisely the elements which might be o f the greatest importan ce to us and which have the task of solving the fiddles of the universe and of reconci ling us to the sufferings of life-it is precisely those elemen ts that are the least well authenticated of any. We shou ld not be able to bring o urselves to accept a nything of so li ttle concern to us as the fact that whales bear young instead of laying eggs, if it were not capable of better proof than this. This state of affairs is in itself a very remarkable psycho­ logical problem. And let no one suppose that what I have said about the impossibility of proving the truth o f religious doctrines contains anything new. It has been felt at all times­ u n doub ted ly, too, by the ancestors who bequeathed us this legacy. Many of them probably nourished the same doubts as ours, but the pressure imposed on them was too strong for them to have dared to utter them. And since then countless people have been tormented by similar doubts, and have striven to supp re ss them, because they thought i t was their duty to believe ; many brilliant intellects have broken down over this confl ic t, and many characters have been impaired by the compromises with which they have tried to find a way out of it. If all the evidence put forward for the a uthentici ty of religious teachings o rigi nates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whe the r the present, about which it is easier to form judge­ ments, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort. If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would g ain enormou sly in credibility. The proceedings of the spiritualists

28

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FUTURE

OF AN I L L U S I O N

meet us a t this point; they are convinced o f the survival of the individual soul and they seek to demonstrate to us beyond doubt the truth of this one religious doctrine. Unfortunately they cannot succeed in refuting the fact that the appearance and utterances of their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity They have called up the spirits of the greatest men and of the most eminent thinkers, but all the pronouncements and information which they have received from them have been so foolish and so wretchedly meaningless that one can find nothing credible in them but the capacity of the spirits to adapt themselves to the circle of people who have conjured them up. I m ust now mention two attempts that have been made­ both of which convey the impression of being desperate efforts-to evade the problem . One, of a violent nature, is ancient; the other is subtle and mod e rn. The first is the ' Credo quia absurdum' of the early Father of the Church. l It maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason­ are above reason. Their truth must be felt inwardly, and they need not be comprehended But this Credo is only of interest as a self confession. As an authoritative statement it has no binding force. Am I to be obliged to believe every absurdity? And if not, why this one in particular? There is no appeal to a court above that of reason. If the tru th of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experi e n c e which bears witness to that truth, what is one to do about the many people who do not have this rare experience? One may require every man to use the gift of reason which he possesses, but one cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone. If one man has gained an unshakable con­ viction of the true reality of religious doctrines from a state of ecstasy which has deeply moved him, of what significance is that to others? The second attempt is the one made by the philosophy of 'As if'. This asserts that our thought-activity includes a great number of hypotheses whose groundlessness and even absurdity we fully realize. They are called 'fictions ' , but for a variety of practical reasons we have to behave ' as if we believed in these fictions . This is the case with religious doctrines because of their incomparable importance for the maintenance of human .

.

-

'

1

['I believe because it is absurd.' This is attributed to Tertullian.]

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29

society. 1 This line of argument is not far removed from the

'Credo quia absurdum' . But I think the demand made by the 'As if' argument is one that only a philosopher could put forward. A man whose thinking is not influenced by the artifices of philo­ sophy will never be able to accept it ; in such a man's view, the admission that something is absurd or contrary to reason leaves no more to be said . It cannot be expected of him that precisely in treating his most important interests he shall forgo the guarantees he requires for all his ordinary activities. I am reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at a n early age b y a peculiarly marked matter-of-factness. When the children were being told a fairy story and were listening to it with rapt attention, he would come up and ask: 'Is that a true story? ' When he was told it was not, he would turn away with a look of disdain. We may expect that people will soon behave in the same way towards the fairy tales of religion, in spite of the advocacy of 'As if'. But at present they still behave quite differently ; and in past times religious ideas, in spite of their incontrovertible lack of authentication, have exercised the strongest possible influence on mankind. This is a fresh psychological pro blem. We must ask where the inner fi)rce of those doctrines lies and to what it is that they owe their efficacy, independent as it is of recognition by reason. I hope I am not doin g him an injustice if I take the philosopher of as the representative of a view which is not foreign to other thinkers : 'We include as fictions not merely indifferent theoretical operations but ideational constructs emanatin g from the noblest minds, to which the noblest part of mankind cling and of which they will not allow themselves to be deprived. Nor is it our object so to deprive them-for as practicalfictions we leave them all intact; they perish only as theoretical truths.' (Hans Vaihinger, 1922, 68 [C. K. Ogden's translation, 1924, 48�9] .) 1

'As if'

VI I THINK we have prepared the way sufficiently for an answer to both these questions. It will be found if we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end­ results of thinking : they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection-for protection through love­ which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life ; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of j ustice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization ; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system. It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father-complex-conflicts which it has never wholly overcome-are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted. When I say that these things are all illusions, I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle's belief that ver­ min are developed out of dung (a belief to which ignorant people still cling) was an error; so was the belief of a former generation of doctors that tabes dorsalis is the result of sexual excess. It would be incorrect to call these errors illusions. On the other hand, it was an illusion of Columbus's that he had discovered a new sea-route to the Indies. The part played by his wish in this error is very clear. One may describe as an illusion the assertion made by certain nationalists that the Indo30

T H E F U T U R E O F AN

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31

Germanic race i s the only one capable of civilization ; o r the

belief, which was only destroyed by psycho-analysis, that children are creatures without sexuality. What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions. But they differ from them, too, apart from the more complicated structure of delusions. In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality. Illusions need

not necessarily be false-that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible ; and a few such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less likely. Whether one classifies this b elief as an illusion or as something analogous to a delusion will depend on one's personal attitude. Examples of illusions which have proved true are not easy to find, but the illusion of the alchemists that all metals can be turned into gold might be one of them. The wish to have a great deal of gold, as much gold as possible, has, it is true, been a good deal damped by our present-day knowledge of the determinants of wealth, but chemistry no longer regards the transmutation of metals into gold as impossible. Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, j ust as the illusion itself sets no store by verification. H aving thus taken our bearings, let us return once more to the question of religious doctrines. We can now repeat that all of them are illusions and insusceptible of proof. No one can be compelled to think them true, to believe in them. Some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with everything we have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world, that we may compare them-if we pay proper regard to the psycho­ logical differences-to delusions. Of the reality value of most of them we cannot judge; just as they cannot be proved, so they cannot be refuted. We still know too little to make a critical approach to them. The riddles of the universe reveal themselves only slowly to our investigation ; there are many questions to which science to-day can give no answer. But scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality out­ side ourselves. It is once again merely an illusion to expect any­ thing from intuition and introspection ; they can give us nothing

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b u t particula rs about our own mental life, which are hard to interpret, n ever any information about the questions which religious doctrine finds it so easy to answer. It would be insolent to let one's own arbitrary will step into the breach and, according to one's personal estimate, declare this or that part of the religious system to be less or more acceptable. Such questions are too momentous for that ; they might be called too sacred. At this p oint one must expect to meet with an obj ection. ' Well then, if even obdurate sceptics admit that the assertions of religion cannot be refuted by reason , why should I not believe in them, since they have so much on their side-tradi­ tion, the agreement of mankind, and all the consolations they offer? ' Why not, indeed? J ust as no one can be forced to believe, so no one can be forced to disbelieve. But do not let us be satisfied with deceiving ourselves that arguments like these take us along the road of correct thinking. If ever there was a case of a lame excuse we have it here. Ignorance is ignorance ; no right to believe anything can be derived from it. In other matters no s ensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so. In reality these are only attempts at pretending to oneself or to other people that one is still firmly attached to religion, when one has long since cut oneself loose from it. Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual mis­ demeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of 'God' to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves ; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. Critics persist in describing as 'deeply religious' anyone who admits to a sense of man's insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what con­ stitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further, but humbly acquiesces in

T H E FU T U R E O F

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the small part which human beings play in the great world­ such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word. To assess the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present enquiry. It is enough for us that we have recognized them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions. But we do not have to conceal the fact that this discovery also strongly influences our attitude to the question which must appear to many to be the most important of all. We know approximately at what periods and by what kind of men religious doctrines were created. If in addition we discover the motives which led to this, our attitude to the prob­ lem of religion will undergo a m arked displacement. We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.

VII

HAVING recognized religious doctrines as illusions, we are at once

faced by a further question : may not other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a simil ar nature? Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well? and is it not the case tha t in our civilization the relations between the sexes are disturbed by an erotic ill usion or a number of such illusions? And once our suspicion has been aroused, we shall not shrink from askin g too whether our conviction that we can learn something about external reality through the use of observation and reasoning in scientific work-whether this conviction has any better foundation . Nothing ought to keep us from directing our observation to our own selves or from applying our thought to criticism of itself. In this field a n umber of investigations open out b efore us, whose results could not but be decisive for the construction of a ' Weltanschauung'. We surmise, moreover, that such an effort would not be wasted and that it would at least in p art j ustify our suspicion. But the author does not dis­ pose of the means for undertaking so comprehensive a task ; he needs must confine his work to following out one only of these illusions-that, namely, of religion. But now the loud voice of our opponent brings us to a halt . We are called to account for our wrong-doing : 'Archaeological interests are no doubt most praiseworthy, but no one undertakes an excavation if by doing so he is going to undermine the h abitations of the living so that they collapse and bury people under their ruins. The doctrines of religion are not a subject one can quibble about like any ot her . Our civilization is built up on them, and the maintenance of human society is based on the majority of men's believing in the truth of those doctrines. If men are taught that there is no almighty and all-j ust God, no divine world-order and no future life, they will feel exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization. Everyone will, witho u t inhibition or fear, follow his asocial, egoistic instincts and seek to exercise his power; Chaos, which we have banished through many thousands of years of the work of civilization, will come again. Even if we ,

34

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35

knew, and could prove, that religion was not in possession of the truth, we ought to conceal the fact and behave in the way pre­ scribed by the philosophy of "As if"-and this in the interest of the preservation of us al. And apart from the danger of the undertaking, it would be a purposeless cruelty. Countless people find their one consolation in religious doctrines, and can only bear life with their help. You would rob them of their support, without having anything better to give them in exchange . It is admitted that so far science has not achieved much, but even if it had advanced much further it would not suffice for man. Man has imperative needs of another sort, which can never be satisfied by cold science; and it is very strange-indeed, it is the height of inconsistency-that a psychologist who has always insisted on what a minor part is played in human affairs by the intelligence as compared with the life of the instincts-that such a psychologist should now try to rob mankind of a precious wish-fulfilment and should pro­ pose to compensate them for it with intellectual nourishment.' What a lot of accusations all at once ! Nevertheless I a m ready with rebuttals for them all ; and, what i s more, I shall assert the view that civilization runs a greater risk if we main­ tain our present at titude to religion than if we give it up. But I hardly know where to begin my reply. Perhaps with the assurance that I myself regard my undertaking as completely harmless and free of risk . It is not I who am overvaluing the intellect this time. If people are as my opponents describe them -and I should not like to contradict them-then there is no dang er of a devout believer's being overcome by my arguments and d eprived of his faith. Besides, I have said nothing which other and better men have not said before me in a much more complete, forcible and impressive manner. Their names are well known, and I shall not cite them, for I should not like to give an impression that I am seeking to rank myself as one of them . All I have done-and this is the only thing that is new in my exposition-is to add some psychological foundation to the criticisms of my great predecessors . It is hardly to be expected that precisely this addition will produce the effect which was denied to those earlier efforts. No doubt I might be asked here what is the point of writing these things if ! am certain that they will be ineffective. But I shall come back to that later. The one person this publication may injure is myself. I shall

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have to listen to the most disagreeable reproaches for my shallowness, narrow-mindedness and lack of idealism or of understanding for the highest interests of mankind. But on the one hand, such remonstrances are not new to me; and on the o ther, if a man has already learnt in his youth to rise superior to the disapproval of his contemporaries, what can it matter to him in his old age when he is certain soon to be beyond the reach of all favour or disfavour? In former times it was different. Then utterances such as mine brought with them a sure curtail­ ment of one's earthly existence and an effective speeding..,up of the opportunity for gaining a personal experience of the after­ life. But, I repeat, those times are past and to-day writings such as this bring no more danger to their author than to their readers . The most that can happen is that the translation and distribution of his book will be forbidden in one country or another-and precisely, of course, in a country that is con­ vinced of the high standard of its culture. But if one puts in any plea at all for the renunciation of wishes and for acquiescence in Fate, one must be able to tolerate this kind of injury too. The further question occurred to me whether the publication of this work might not after all do harm. Not to a person, how­ ever, but to a cause-the cause of psycho-analysis. For it can­ not be denied that psycho-analysis is my creation, and it has met with plenty of mistrust and ill-will . In now come forward with such displeasing pronouncements, people will be only too ready to make a displacement from my person to psycho­ analysis. 'Now we see,' they will say, 'where psycho-analysis leads to . The mask has fallen ; it leads to a denial of God and of a moral ideal, as we always suspected. To keep us from this discovery we have been deluded into thinking that psycho­ analysis has no Weltansch auung and never can construct one. ' l An o utcry of this kind will really b e disagreeable to m e on account of my many fellow-workers, some of whom do not by any means share my attitude to the problems of religion. But psycho-analysis has already weathered many storms and now it must brave this fresh one. In point of fact psycho-analysis is a method of research, an impartial instrument, like the infini­ tesimal c alculus, as it were. If a physicist were to discover with the latter's help that after a certain time the earth would be 1

and

[See some remarks at the end of Chapter II of Inhibitions, Symptoms Anxie!y ( 1 926d) , Standard Ed. , 20, 95--6.]

THE F U T U R E O F AN I L L U S I O N

37

destroyed, we would nevertheless hesitate to attribute destruc­

tive tend enci es to the calculus itself and therefore to p ros cribe it. Nothing that I have said here against the truth-value of

religions needed th e support of psycho-analysis ; it had been said by others long before analysis came into existence. If the application of the psycho-analytic method makes it possible to

find a new argument against the truths of religion, lant pis for religi on ; but defend e rs of religion will by the same right make use of p sycho-analysis in order to give full value to the affective signifi cance of religious doctrines. And now to proceed with our defence . Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contri­

buted much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not e nough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in com­ forting them, in reco nciling them to life and in making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of attempting to alter the existing conditions. But what do we see instead? We see that an app allingly large number of p eople are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke which must be shaken off; and that these people either do everything in their power to ch ang e that civil i z ation , or else go so far in their hos ti li ty to it that they will have nothing to do with civilization or with a restriction of instinct. At this point it will be objected ag ainst us that this state of affairs is due to the very fact that reli gion has lost a part of its influence over human masses precisely because of the deplorable effect of the advances of science. We will note this admission and the reason given for it, and we shall make use of it later for our own purposes ; but the objection itself has no force. It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway ; more moral they certainly were not. They have always known how to extern alize the precepts of religion and thus to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to ensure obedience to religio n , met th em hal f- w ay in this. God's kindness must lay a restraining hand on His justice. One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then one was fre e to sin once more. Russian introspectiveness has reached the p itch of concluding that sin is indispensable for the enjoyment of all the

38

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blessings of divine grace, so that, at bottom, sin is pleasing to God. It is no s ecret that the priests could only keep the masses submissive to religion by making such large concessions as these to the instinctual nature of man. Thus it was agreed: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful. In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to man's happi­ ness, susceptibility to culturel and moral control are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we are not over­ rating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it. Let us consider the unmistakable situation as it is to-day. We have heard the admission that religion no longer has the same influence on people that it used to. ( We are here concerned with E uropean Christian civilization.) And this is not because its promises have grown less but because people find them less credible. Let us admit that the reason-though perhaps not the only reason-for this change is the increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of human society. Criticism has whittled away the evidential value of religious documents, natural science has shown up the errors in them, and compara­ tive research has been struck by the fatal resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and the mental products of primitive peoples and times. The scientific spirit brings about a particular attitude to wards worldly matters ; before religious matters it pauses for a little, hesitates, and finally there too crosses the threshold. In this process there is no stopping ; the greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling-away from religious belief-at first only from its obsolete and objectionable trappings, but later fro m its fundamental postulates as well. The Americans who instituted the 'monkey trial' at Dayton2 have alone shown them­ selves consistent. Elsewhere the inevitable transition is accom­ plished by way of half-measures and insincerities. 1 [The nature of 'susceptibility to culture' had been discussed by Freud in the first section of his paper on 'War and Death' ( 1 9 1 5b) , Standard Ed. , 14, 283.] 2 [A small town in Tennessee where, in 1 925, a science teacher was prosecuted for breach of a State law by teaching that 'man is descended from the lower animals'.]

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39

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain­ workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviour by other, secular motives would proceed unobtrusively; moreover, such people are to a large extent themselves vehicles of civilization. But it is another m atter with the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed, who have every reason for being enemies of civilization. So long as they do not discover that people no longer believe in God, all is well. But they will discover it, infallibly, even if this piece of writing of mine is not published. And they are ready to accept the results of scientific thinking, but without the change having taken place in them which scientific thinking brings about in people. Is there not a danger here that the hostility of these masses to civilization will throw itself against the weak spot that they have found in their task-mistress? If the sale reason why you must not kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life­ then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision. ·

VIII

ONE might think that there would be no special difficulties in the way of carrying out this latter proposal. It is true that it would involve a certain amount of renunciation, but more would perhaps b e gained than lost, and a great danger would be avoided. Everyone is frightened of it, however, as though it would expose civilization to a still greater danger. When St. Boniface l cut down the tree that was venerated as sacred by the Saxons the bystanders expected some fearful event to follow upon the sacrilege. But nothing happened, and the Saxons accepted baptism. When civilization laid down the commandment that a man shall not kill the neighbour whom he hates or who is in his way or whose p roperty he covets, this was clearly done in the interest of man's communal existence, which would not otherwise b e practicable. F o r the murderer would draw down o n himself the vengeance of the murdered man's kinsmen and the secret envy of others, who within themselves feel as much inclined as he does for such acts of violence. Thus he would not enj oy his revenge or his robbery for long, but would have every prospect of soon being killed himself. Even if he protected himself against his single foes by extraordinary strength and caution, he would be bound to succumb to a combination of weaker men . If a combination of this sort did not take place, the murdering would continue endlessly and the final outcome would be that men would exterminate one another. We should arrive at the same state of affairs between individuals as still persists in Corsica between families, though elsewhere only between nations. Insecurity of life, which is an equal danger for everyone, now unites men into a society which prohibits the individual from killing and reserves to itself the right to communal killing of anyone who violates the prohibi­ tion. Here, then, we have j ustice and punishment. But we do not publish this rational explanation of the prohibition against murder. We assert that the prohibition has b een issued by God. Thus we take it upon ourselves to guess His intentions, and we find that He, too, is unwilling for men 1 [The eighth-century, Devonshire-born, 'Apostle of Germany'.] 40

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41

to exterminate one another. In behaving in this way we are investing the cultural prohibition with a quite special solem­ nity, but at the same time we risk making its observance de­ pendent on beliefin God. If we retrace this step-if we no longer attribute to God what is our own will and if we content our­ selves with giving the social reason-then, it is true, we have renounced the transfiguration of the cultural prohibition, but we have also avoided the risk to it. But we gain something else as well. Through some kind of diffusion or infection, the character of sanctity and inviolability-of belonging to another world, one might say-has spread from a few major pro­ hibitions on to every other cultural regulation, law and ordinance. But on these the halo often looks far from becoming : not only do they invalidate one another by giving contrary decisions at different times and places, but apart from this they show every sign of human inadequacy. It is easy to recognize in them things that can only be the product of short­ sighted apprehensiveness or an expression of selfishly narrow interests or a conclusion based on insufficient premisses. The criticism which we cannot fail to level at them also diminishes to an unwelcome extent our respect for other, more justifiable cultural demands. Since it is an awkward task to separate what God Himself has demanded from what can be traced to the authority of an all-powerful parliament or a high judiciary, it would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and hone�tly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement. This would be an important advance along the road which leads to becoming reconciled to the burden of civilization. But here our plea for ascribing purely rational reasons to the precepts of civilization-that is to say, for deriving them from social necessity-is interrupted by a sudden doubt. We have chosen as our example the origin of the prohibition against murder. But does our account of it tally with historical truth? We fear not; it appears to be nothing but a rationalistic

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construction. With the help of psycho- analysis, w e have made a. s tudy of precisely this piece of the cultural history of mankind, 1 and, basing ourselves on it, we are bound to say that in reality things happened otherwise . Even in present-day man purely reasonable m otives can effect little against passionate impul­ sions. How much weaker then must they have been in the human animal of primaeval times ! Perhaps his descendants would even now kill one another without inhibition, if it were not that among those murderous acts there was one-the kill­ ing of the primitive father-which evoked an irresistible emotional reaction with momentous consequences. From it arose the commandment: Thou shalt not kill. Under totemism this commandment was restricted to the father-substitute; but it was later extended to other people, though even to-day it is not universally obeyed . But, a s was shown b y arguments which I need not repeat here, the primal father was the original image of God, the model on which later generations have shaped the figure of God. Hence the religious explanation is right. God actually played a part in the genesis of that prohibition ; it was His influence, not any insight into social necessity, which created it. And the dis­ placement of man's will on to God is fully j ustified. For men knew that they had disposed of their father by violence, and in their reaction to that impious deed, they determined to respect his will thenceforward. Thus religious doctrine tells us the historical truth-though subject, it is true, to some modi­ fication and disguise-whereas our rational account disavows it. We now observe that the store of religious ideas includes not only wish-fulfilments but important historical recollections. This concurrent influence of past and present must give religion a truly incomparable wealth of power. But perhaps with the help of an analogy yet another discovery may begin to dawn on us. Though it is not a good plan to transplant ideas far from the soil in which they grew up, yet here is a conformity which we cannot avoid pointing out. We know that a human child cannot successfully complete its development to the civilized stage without passing through a phase of neurosis sometimes of greater and sometimes of less distinctness . This is because so many instinctual demands which will later be 1

[Cf. the fourth

essay in

Totem and Taboo ( 1 9 1 2-1 3).]

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unserviceable cannot be suppressed by the rational operation of the child's intellect but have to be tamed by acts of repression, behind which, as a rule, lies the motive of anxiety. Most of these infantile neuroses are overcome spontaneously in the course of growing up, and this is especially true of the obses­ sional neuroses of childhood. The remainder can be cleared up later still by psycho-analytic treatment. In just the same way, one might assume, humanity as a whole, in its development through the ages, fell into states analogous to the neuroses, 1 and for the same reasons-namely because in the times of its ignorance and intellectual weakness the instinctual renuncia­ tions indispensable for man's communal existence had only been achieved by it by means of purely affective forces . The precipitates of these processes resembling repression which took place in prehistoric times still remained attached to civilization for long periods. Religion would thus be the universal obses­ sional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that we find our­ selves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development. Our behaviour should therefore be modelle d on that of a sensible teacher who does not oppose an impending new development but seeks to ease its path and mitigate the violence of its . irruption. Our analogy does not, to be sure, exhaust the essential nature of religion. If, on the one h and, religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, on the other hand it com­ prises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal s of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere els e but in amentia, 3 in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. But these are only analogies, by the help of which we endeavour to understand a social phenomenon ; the pathology of the indi­ vidual does no t supply us with a fully valid counterpart. I t has been repeatedly pointed out (by myself and in 1

[ Freud returned

at the end of his Civilization and its the last of the New Introductory Lectures ( 1 933a) and in Chapter III of Moses and Monotheism ( 1 939a) .] I [See the paper o n ' Fetishism' ( 1 92 7e).1 a r' Meynert's amentia' : a state of acute hallucinatory confusion.] to this question

Discontents ( 1 930a) , in

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particular b y Theodor Reik1) in how great detail the analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis can be followed out, and how many of the peculiarities and vicissitudes in the form­ ation of religion can be understood in that light. And it tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.a Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. We may foresee, but hardly regret, that such a process of remoulding will not stop at renouncing the solemn transfiguration of cultural precepts, but that a general revision of them will result in many of them being done away with. In this way our appointed task of reconciling men to civilization will to a great extent be achieved. We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put for­ ward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. H ere, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived ; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a 1 [Cf. Freud, 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices' ( 1 907b) and Reik ( 1 92 7 ) .] I [Freud had often made this point before : e.g. in a sentence added in 1 9 1 9 to his study on Leonardo da Vinci ( 1 9 I Oc) , Standard Ed., 11,

1 23.]

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knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level. l 1 [Freud later drew a distinction between what he termed 'material' and 'historical' truth in several passages. See, in particular, Section G of Part II of Chapter I I I of Moses and Monotheism ( 1 939a) . Cf. also an Editor's footnote on the subject in Chapter XI I (C) of The Psycho­ pathology of Everyday Life ( 1 90 I b) , Standard Ed., 6, 256.]

IX • You permit yourself contradictions which are hard to reconcile with one another. You begin by saying that a piece of writing like yours is quite harmless : no one will let himself be robbed of his faith by considerations of the sort put forward in it. But since it is nevertheless your intention, as becomes evident later on, to upset that faith, we may ask why in fact you are publish­ ing your work? In another passage, moreover, you admit that it may be dangerous, indeed very dangerous, for someone to discover that p eople no longer believe in God. Hitherto he has been docile, but now he throws off his obedience to the pre­ cepts of civilization. Yet your whole contention that basing the commandments of civilization on religious grounds constitutes a danger for civilization rests on the assumption that the believer can be turned into an unbeliever. Surely that is a complete contradiction. 'And here is another. O n the one hand you admit that men cannot be guided through their intelligence, they are ruled by their passions and their instinctual demands. But on the other hand you propose to replace the affective basis of their obedi­ ence to civilization by a rational one. Let who can understand this. To me it seems that it must be either one thing or the other. 'Besides, have you learned nothing from history? Once before an attempt of this kind was made to substitute reason for religion, officially and in the grand manner. Surely you remember the French Revolution and Robespierre? And you must also remember how short-lived and miserably ineffectual the experiment was? The same experiment is being repeated in Russia at the present time, and we need not feel curious as to its outcome. Do you not think we may take it for granted that men cannot do without religion? 'You have said yourself that religion is more than an obses­ sional neurosis. But you have not dealt with this other side of it. You are content to work out the analogy with a neurosis. Men, you say, must be freed from a neurosis. What else may be lost in the p rocess is of no concern to you. ' T h e appearance o f contradiction has probably come about

46

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47

because I have dealt with complicated matters too hurriedly. But we can reme:y this to some extent. I still maintain that what I have written is quite harmless in one respect. No believer will let himself be led astray from his faith by these or any similar arguments. A believer is bound to the teachings of religion by certain ties of affection. But there are undoubtedly countless other people who are not in the same sense believers. They obey the precepts of civilization because they let them­ selves be intimidated by the threats of religion, and they are afraid of religion so long as they have to consider it as a part of the reality which hems them in. They are the people who bre ak away as soon as they are allowed to give up their belief in the reality-value of religion. But they too are unaffected by argu­ ments . They cease to fear religion when they observe that others do not fear it; and it was of them that I asserted that they would get to know about the decline of religious influence even if I did not publish my work. [Cf. p. 39.] But I think you yourself attach more weight to the other contradiction which you charge me with. Since men are so little accessible to reasonable arguments and are so entirely governed by their instinctual wishes, why should one set out to deprive them of an instinctual satisfaction and replace it by reasonable arguments? It is true that men are like this ; but have you asked yourself whether they must be like this, whether their innermost nature necessitates it? Can an anthropologist give the cranial index of a people whose custom it is to deform their children's heads by bandaging them round from their earliest years? Think of the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult. Can we be quite certain that it is not precisely religious education which bears a large share of the blame for this relative atrophy? I think it would be a very long time before a child who was not influenced began to trouble himself about God and things · in another world. Perhaps his thoughts on these matters would then take the same paths as they did with his forefathers. But we do not wait for such a development ; we introduce him to the doctrines of religion at an age when he is neither interested in them nor capable of grasping their import. Is it not true that the two main points in the programme for the education of children to-day are retardation of sexual development and premature religious

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influence? Thus by the time the child's intellect awakens, the doctrines of religion have already become unassailable. But are you of opinion that it is very conducive to the strengthening of the intellectual function that so important a field should be closed against it by the threat of Hell-fire? When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect. But we have no other means of controlling our instinctual nature but our intelligence. How can we expect p eople who are under the dominance of pro­ hibitions of thought to attain the psychological ideal, the primacy of the intelligence? You know, too, that women in general are said to suffer from 'physiological feeble-minded­ ness' l-that is, from a lesser intelligence than men. The fact itself is disputable and its interpretation doubtful, but one argument in favour of this intellectual atrophy being of a secondary nature is that women labour under the harshness of an early prohibition against turning their thoughts to what would most have interested them-namely, the problems of sexual life. So long as a person's early years are influenced not only by a sexual inhibition of thought but also by a religious inhibition and by a loyal inhibition2 derived from this, we cannot really tell what in fact he is like. But I will moderate my zeal and admit the possibility that I , too, am chasing an illusion. Perhaps the effect o f the religious prohibition of thought may not be so bad as I suppose ; perhaps it will turn out that human nature remains the same even if education is not abused in order to subj ect people to religion. I do not know and you cannot know either. It is not only the great problems of this life that seem insoluble at the present time; m any lesser questions too are difficult to answer. But you must admit that here we are j ustified in having a hope for the future-that perhaps there is a treasure to be dug up capable of enriching civilization and that it is worth making the experi­ ment of an irreligious education. Should the experiment prove unsatisfactory I am ready to give up the reform and to return 1 [The phrase was used by Moebius ( 1 903) . cr. Freud's early paper on 'civilized' sexual morality ( 1 908d) , Standard Ed., 9, 1 99, where the present argument is anticipated.] 2 [I.e. in regard to the Monarchy.]

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to my e arlier, pu rely descriptive j u dgem ent that man is a cre ature of weak intelligence who is ruled by his instinctual

wishes.

On another point I agree with you u nrese rvedly . It is certainly senseless to begin by trying to do away with religion by force and at a single blow. Above all, because it would be ho peless. The believer will not let his belief be tom from him, either by arguments or b y prohibitions. And even if this did su cce ed with some it would be c ru elty. A man who has been taking sleeping draughts fo r tens of years is naturally unable to sleep if his sleeping draught is taken away from him. That the effect of religious consolations may be likened to that of a nar­ cotic is well illustrated by what is happening in America. There they are now trying-obviously under the influence of pettico at government-to deprive people of al stimulants, in toxic ants , and other pleasure-producing su bstances, and inste ad� by way of compensation, are su rfeiting them with piety. This is ano ther experiment as to whose outcome we need not feel curious [p. 46) .1 Thus I m ust contradict you when you go on to argu e that men are co mpletely unable to do witho u t the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of re ality . That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet-or bitter-sweet­ poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true , find the ms elves in a difficult situation . They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their in si gnific ance in the m achin ery of the universe ; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no lo nger the object of tender care on the part of a benefice nt Providence. They wil be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But s urely infantilism is destined to be su rmounte d . Meri cannot remain children for ever ; they must in the end go out into 'hostile life'. We may call thi s 'education to realiry'. Nee d I confess to you that the sole purpose of my b ook is to poin t out the necessity for this forward step? 1 [This was written in the middle of the period of National Prohibition in the United States ( 1 920-33) .]

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You are afraid, probably, that they will not stand u p to the hard test? Well, let us at least hope they will. It is something, at any rate, to know that one is thrown up,m one's own resources. One learns then to make a proper use 0 f them. And men are not entirely without assistance. Their scientific knowledge has taught them much since the days of the Deluge, and it will increase their power still further. And, as for the great neces­ sities of Fate, agai n st which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation. Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and co ncentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow­ unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret: D e n Himmel iiberlassen wir Den Engeln und den Spatzen . 1 1 ['We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows.' From Heine's poem Deutschland ( C apu t I ) . The word which is here translated 'fellow­ unbelievers'-in German ' Unglaubensgenossen'-was applied by Heine himself to Spinoza. It had been quoted by Freud as an example of a particular kind of j oke-technique in his book on jokes ( 1 905c) , Standard Ed. , 8, 77.]

X

'THAT sounds splendid! A race of men who have reno unced all illusions and have thus become capable of making their existence on earth tolerable ! I, however, cannot share your expectations. And that is not because I am the obstinate reactionary you perhaps take me for. No, it is because I am sensible. We seem now to have exchanged roles : you emerge as an enthusiast who allows himself to be carried away by illusions, and I stand for the claims of reason, the rights of scepticism. What you have been expounding seems to me to be built upon errors which, following your example, I may call illusions, because they betray clearly enough the influence of your wishes. You pin your hope on the possibility that generations which have not experienced the influence of religious doctrines in early childhood will easily attain the desired primacy of the intelligence over the life of the instincts. This is surely an ilu­ sion : in this decisive respect human nature is hardly likely to change . If I am not mistaken-one knows so little about other civilizations-there are even to-day peoples which do not grow up under the pressure of a religious system, and yet they approach no nearer to your ideal than the rest. If you wan t to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteris­ tics of religion-the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought-for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education. The path from the infant at the breast to the civilized man is a long one ; too many human young would go astray on it and fail to reach their life-tasks at the proper time if they were left without guidance to their own development. The doctrines which had been applied in their upbringing would always set limits to the thinking of their riper years-which is exactly what you reproach religion with doing to-day. Do you not observe that it is an ineradicable and innate defect of our and every other civilization, that it imposes on children, who are driven by instinct and weak in intellect, the making of decisions which only 51

52

THE F U T U R E OF AN I L L U S I O N

the mature intelligence of adults can vindicate? But civilization cannot do otherwise, because of the fact that mankind's age­ long development is compressed into a few years of childhood ; and it is only by emotional forces that the child can be induced to master the task set before it. Such, then, are the prospects for your "primacy of the intellect" . 'And now you must not be surprised if I plead on behalf of re taining the religious doctrinal system as the basis of education " and of man's communal life. This is a practical problem, not a question of reality-value. Since, for the sake of preserving our civilization, we cannot postpone influencing the individual until he has become ripe for civilization (and many would never become so in any case) , since we are obliged to impose on the growing child some doctrinal system which shall o perate in him as an axiom that admits of no criticism, it seems to me that the religious system is by far the most suitable for the purpose. And it is so, of course, precisely on account of its wish-fulfilling and consolatory power, by which you claim to recognize it as an "illusion" . In view of the difficulty of discovering anything about reality-indeed, of the doubt whether it is possible for us to do so at all-we must not overlook the fact that human needs, too, are a piece of reality, and, in fact, an important piece and one that concerns us especially closely. 'Another advantage of religious doctrine resides, to my mind, in one of its characteristics to which you seem to take particular exception. For it allows of a refinement and sublima­ tion of ideas, which make it possible for it to be divested of most of the traces which it bears of primitive and infantile thinking. What then remains is a body of ideas which science no longer contradicts and is unable to disprove. These modifica­ tions of religious doctrine, which you have condemned as half­ measures and compromises, make it possible to avoid the cleft between the uneducated masses and the philosophic thinker, and to preserve the common bond between them which is so important for the safeguarding of civilization . With this, there would be no need to fear that the men of the people would dis­ cover that the upper strata of society "no longer believe in God". I think I have now shown that your endeavours come down to an attempt to replace a proved and emotionally valuable illusion by another one, which is unproved and without emotional value. '

THE FU TURE

OF

AN

I L L U S ION

53

You will not find m e inaccessible t o your criticism. I know how difficult it is to avoid illusions ; perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction. They have not the character of a delusion. If experience should show-not to me, but to others after me, who think as I do-that we have been mistaken, we will give up our expectations. Take my attempt for what it is. A psychologist who does not deceive himself about the difficulty of finding one's bearings in this world, makes an endeavour to assess the development of man, in the light of the small portion of knowledge he has gained through a study of the mental pro­ cesses of individuals during their development from child to adult. In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis. These discoveries derived from individual psychology may be insufficient, their application to the human race un­ justified, and his optimism unfounded. I grant you all these uncertainties. But often one cannot refrain from saying what one thinks, and one excuses oneself on the ground that one is not giving it out for more than it is worth. And there are two points that I must dwell on a little longer. Firstly, the weakness of my position does not imply any strength­ ening of yours. I think you are defending a lost cause. We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weak­ ness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance. And' from it one can derive yet other hopes . The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an irifiniteb distant one. It will presumably set itself the same aims as those whose realization you expect from your God (of course within human limits-so far as external reality, 'AvaY"1J, allows it) , namely the love of man and the decrease of suffering. This being so, we may

54

T H E F U T U R E O F AN

I L LU S I O N

tell ourselves that our antagonism is only a temporary one and not irreconcilable. We desire the same things, but you are more impatient, more exacting, and-why should I not s ay it?­ more self· s eeking than I and those on my side. You would have the state of bliss b egin directly after death ; you expect the impossible from it and you will not surrender the claims of the individual . Our God, Aoyor;,1 will fulfil whichever of these wishes n ature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new generation of men. He promises no compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life. On the way to this distant goal your religious d octrines will have to be discarded, no matter whether the first attempts fail, or whether the first substitutes prove to be untenable. You know why : in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable. Even purified religious ideas cannot escape this fate, so long as they try to preserve any­ thing of the consolation of religion . No doubt if they confine themselves to a belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenge of science ; but then they will also lose their hold on human interest. And secondly : observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited-and indeed the threat to it is great enough-then your world collapses . There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations tum out to be illusions. Education freed from the burden of religious doctrines will not, it may be, effect much change in men's psychological nature. Our god Aoyor; is perhaps not a very almighty one, and he may only be able to fulfil a small part of what his predecessors have promised. If we have to acknowledge this we shall accept it with resignation. We shall not on that account lose our interest in the world and in life, for we have one sure support 1

The twin gods At:Syo, [Logos: Reason] and 'AvaY"'1 [Ananke: the Dutch writer Multatuli. [ef. an Editor's footnote to 'The Economic Problem of Masochism' ( 1 924c) , Standard Ed. , 19, 168.]

Necessity] of

T H E F U T U R E O F AN

ILLUSION

55

which you lack. We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion. Science has many open enemies, and many more secret ones, among those who cannot forgive her for having weakened religious faith and for threatening to overthrow it. She is reproached for the smallness of the amount she has taught us and for the incomparably greater field she has left in obscurity. But, in this, people forget how young she is, how difficult her beginnings were and how infinitesimally small is the period of time since the human intellect has been strong enough for the tasks she sets. Are we not all at fault, in basing our j udgements on periods of time that are too short? We should make the geologists our pattern. People complain of the unreliability of science-how she announces as a law to-day what the next generation recognizes as an error and replaces by a new law whose accepted validity lasts no longer. But this is unj ust and in part untrue. The transformations of scientific opinion are developments, advances, not revolutions. A law which was held at first to be universally valid proves to be a special case of a more comprehensive uniformity, or is limited by another law, not discovered till later; a rough approximation to the truth is replaced by a more carefully adapted one, which in turn awaits further perfectioning. There are various fields where we have not yet surmounted a phase of research in which we make trial with hypotheses that soon have to be rej ected as inadequate ; but in other fields we already possess an assured and almost unalterable core of knowledge. Finally, an attempt has been made to discredit scientific endeavour in a radical way, on the ground that, being bound to the conditions of our own organization, it can yield nothing else than sub­ jective results, whilst the real nature of things outside ourselves remains inaccessible. But this is to disregard several factors which are of decisive importance for the understanding of scientific work. In the first place, our organization-that is, our mental apparatus-has been developed precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency: in the

56

THE

F U T U R E O F AN

I L LU S I O N

second place, i t is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such an investi­ gation; thirdly, the task of science is fully covered if we limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization ; fourthly, the ultimate findings of science, precisely because of the way in which they are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but by the things which have affected that o rganization ; finally, the problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest. No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to su ppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND AUTHOR INDEX LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

G.S. G. W.

Freud, -Freud, Freud, C.P. Standard Ed. Freud,

Gesammelte Schriften ( 1 2 vols.), Vienna, 1 924-114 Gesammelte Werke ( 1 8 vols.), London, from 1 940 Co llected Papers (5 vols.), London, 1 924-50 Standard Edi tion ( 2 4 vols.), London, from 1 9 5 3

TITLES of books and periodicals are in italics; titles of papers are in in· verted commas. Abbreviations are in accordance with the World List of Scientific Periodicals (London, 1 952). Further abbreviations used in this volume will be found in the List above. Numerals in boldface refer to volumes; ordinary numerals refer to pages. The figures in pa· rentheses at the end of each entry indicate the page or pages of this volume on which the work in question is men tioned. In th e case of the Freud entries, the letters attached to the dates of publication are in accordance with the corresponding entries in the complete bibliography of Freud's writings to be included in the last volume of the Standard

Edition.

For non·technical authors, and for technical authors where no specific work is mentioned, see the General I ndex. ' FREUD, S. ( 1 899a) 'Ober Deckerinnerungen', G.S., 1, 465 ; G. W., 1, 52 9. (Il l ) [ Trans. : 'Screen Memories', C.P., 5 . 4 7 ; Standard Ed., 3 .] ( 1 900a) Die Traumdeutung, Vienna. G.S., 2-3; G. W., 2-3 . ( 1 7) [Trans. : The Interpretation of Dreams, London and New York, 1 955; Standard Ed., 4-5'] ( 1 90 l b) Zur Psychopathologie des A lltagslebens, Berlin, 1 904. G.S., 4. 3 ; G. W., 4· (45) [Trans. : The Psych opathology of Everyday Life, Standard Ed., 6.] ( 1 905c) Der Witz und seine B eziehung zum Unbewussten, Vienna. G.S., 9. 5 ; G. W., 6. (50) [Trans. : Jokes and their Rela tion to the Unconscious, Standard Ed.,

8.]

( 1 907b) 'Zwangshandlungen und Religionsiibung', G.S.,

10.

2 1 0 ; G . W .,

7. 1 2 9. (3, 43-4) [Trans. : 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices', C .P., 2.

Standard Ed., 9, 1 1 6.] 57

25 ;

58

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FREUD, S. (con t . ) ( 1 908d) 'Die "kulturelle" Sexualmoral un d die mod erne Nervosi tat' , G.S., 5, 1 43 ; G . W., 7, 1 43· (48) [ Tra ns . : ' "Civilized" Sexual Moral i ty and M o d e r n Nervous I l l ness', C .P.,

2.

76; S t a n dard Ed., 9. 1 7 9.)

( 1 908e [ 1 907) ) 'Der Dichter und das Phan tasieren'. G.S., 10. 2 2 9 ; G. W., 7. 2 1 3 . ( 1 4) [ Tra ns. : 'Creative W r it er s an d Day D re a m i n g ' , C .P., 4. 1 7 3 ; Standard Ed., 9, 1 43·) ( 1 9 I oc) Eine Kind h e i tserinnerung d es Leonardo da Vinci, V i e n n a . G.S., 9, 37 1 ; G. w., 8. 1 2 8 . (44) [ Trans. : L e onardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Child h o o d, Standard

1 1 . 59 .] ( 1 9 1 2- 1 3) Totem 1 7, 2 2-4, 42)

Ed.,

und Tabu, Vien n a ,

1 9 1 3.

G.S.,

10. 3;

G. W.,

9

(3,

London, 1 9 50; N ew York , 1 952 ; Stan dard 1 3. 1 .] ( 1 9 1 4C) 'Zur Einfiihrung des Narzissmus', G.S., 6. 1 55; G.W., 10. 1 38. (23) [ Trans. : 'On Narcissism : an I ntroduction', C .P., 4. 30; Stan dard Ed., 1 4 . 69 .] ( 1 9 1 5b) 'Zei tgemasses tiber Krieg uncl Tod', G.S., 10. 3 1 5 ; G. W., 10. 324. (38) [ Trans . : ' T hou ght s for the Times on War and Death ' , C.P., 4. 2 88 ; Stan dard E d . , 14. 275. ] ( 1 92 I C) Massenpsyc h o logie u n d Ich-A nalyse, V ie n na. G.S., 6. 26 1 ; G. W., 13. 73· (7) [ Trans. : Group Psy c h o logy and the A nalysis of t h e Ego, Lo n do n , 1 959; N ew York. 1 960; Standard Ed., 18. 67.] ( 1 92 3 b ) Das Ich und das Es, Vienna. G.S., 6. 353; C . W., 13. 237. ( 1 1 ) [ Trans. : T h e Ego a n d t h e Id, London, 1 9 2 7 ; Standard Ed., 19. 3.] ( 1 924C) 'Das okonomische Pro bl em des M asochismus', C.S., 5. 374; G . W., 1 3. 3 7 1 . (54) [ Trans. : ' T h e Economic Problem of Masochism', C.P., 2. 2 5 5 ; Stan­ dard Ed., 1 9. 1 57 . ] ( 1 926 d ) Hemm u ng, Symp t o m und A ngst, V i e n n a . G . S . , 1 1. 23; G. W., 1 4. I 1 3· (36) [ Trans. : In h i b i t ions, Sy mpt oms and A nx iety, London, 1 960 (The Prob lem of A nx iety, New York, 1 936) ; Standard Ed. , 20 . 7 7 .] [ Trans. : Totem a n d Tab oo,

Ed.,

( 1 9 2 6e) Die Frage der Laienanalyse, V i e n n a . C.S., 1 1 . 307; G . W.,

1 4_

209. (2 1 ) [ Trans. : Th e Ques t ion of Lay A nalysis,

20, 1 7 9·] ( 1 9 2 7 e) 'Fetischismus' ,

C .S .,

Lon don , 1 947 ;

1 1 . 3 9 5 ; G . W., 1 4_

31 1.

(43)

Standard Ed.,

BIBLIOGRA PHY

59

FREUD, S. (con t.) [ Trans. : 'Fetishism', C .P . , 5, 1 98 ; Standard Ed., l U , 1 49.] ( 1 93oa) Das Un behagen in der Kultur, Vienna. C.S., Il, 29; G. W., 14, 42 1 • (3, 6, 9, 43) [ Trans. : Civiliuz tion and its Disconten ts, London and N ew York, 1 930; Standard Ed., 21 , 5 9.] ( 1 933a) Neue Fo lge der Tlorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die Psycho. analyse, Vienna. G.s., 1 2, 1 5 1 ; C. W., 15, 207 . (3) [ Trans. : New In troductory Lectures on Psycho.A nalysis, London and New York, 1 93 3 ; Standard Ed., 22.] ( 1 933b) Warum Krieg'!, C.S., Il, 349 ; C. W., 1 6, 1 3 · (3-4, 9) [ Trans. : Why War?, C .P. , 5, 273 ; Standard Ed., 22.] ( 1 935a) Postscript ( 1 935) to An A u tobiograph ical Study, new edition, London and N ew York; Stan dard E d., 2 0, 7 1 . (3) [Cerman Tex t : 'Nachschrift 1 935 zur Selbstdarstellung', 2 nd edition, Vienna, 1 936; G. W., 16, 3 1 . German original first appeared late in 1 935·] ( 1 936a) Letter to Romain Rolland : 'Eine Erin nerungsstorung auf der Akropolis', G W., 1 6, 2 50. (25-6) [ Trans. : 'A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis', C .P., 5. 302 ; .

S tandard Ed.,

22.]

( 1 939a [ 1 937-39]) Der Mann Moses und die monoth eistisch e R e ligion, C. W., 16, 1 03. (4, 43, 45) [ Trans. : Moses and Monotheism, London and New York, 1 939; Stan· dard Ed., 23.] MOEBIUS, P. J. ( 1 90 3) tJber den physiologischen Schwachsinn de.! Weibes (5th ed.), Hallt;. (48) REIK, T. ( 1 927) 'Dogma und Zwangsidee' : eine psychoanaly tische S tudie zur En twicklung der Religion', Imago, 13, 247; in book form, Vienna, 1 92 7 . (43 4) [ Trans.: In Dogma and Compulsions: Psych oana ly tic Studies on My ths and R e ligions, N ew York, 1 95 1 .] VAIHINGER, H. ( 1 922)' Die Ph ilosophie des A ls �b, Berlin. (7 th and 8th ed. ; 1 St ed., 1 9 1 1 .) (2 8-9) [ Trans. : Th e Philosophy of 'A s if', London, 1 924.]

GENERAL INDEX

THIS index includes the names of non technical authors_ It also incl udes the names of technical au thors where no reference is made in the text to specific works. For reference to specific technical works, the Bibliography should be consul ted. The compilation of the index was undertaken by Mrs. R. S . Partridge. Acropolis, the 25 Aggressiveness, and 1 0- 1 2 Ambivalence, 24

civilization,

Civilization aggressive impulses and, 7 , 10- 1 2 art and, 1 2-14 defined , 3 -6 hostility of individual to. 6 , 9- 1 6. 37 moral demands of, 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 5 . 1 8- 1 9 rational basis for. 40- 1 , 43-4. 46-7. 53-4 religion and. 1 8-22 , 34-5 . 3 7 ""9 , 4352 . 54 restrictions imposed by, 7- 1 6. 1 8 . 3 7 . 43. 50 science and, 6. 3 1 . 34-5 . 37 , 50. 5 4-6

7,

Amentia, Meynert's, 43 America Prohibition in, 49 n. religion in, 1 9 Anacli tic object choice, 23-4 Analogies addiction to narcotics, 49 cranial index of bandaged heads, 47 infinitesimal calculus, 36-7 smallholders on earth and estates i n t h e moon, 5 0 A nanke, 53, 54 n . Animal gods, 2 3

social aspect of. 6-7. 9. 1 1 - 1 2 . 40 4

Colum bus, 30

Confusional states. 43 Constance (town). 25 Corsican vendetta. 40 Credo quia a bsurdum, 2 8""9 Culture and civiliza tion, 3-4, 6

Animals, 5-6 , 1 0 Anxiety (see a lso Fear) , 1 6- 1 7 , 2 4 , 43 A ris t o t le, 30 Art, and civilization, 1 2 1 4 • A s if', philosophy of, 28""9 . 35 Athens. 25

Danger, 24 Dayton 'monkey trial', 38 Death riddle of. 1 6 1 9

Bodensee. 25 Bon iface, St., 40

survival after (see Immortali ty) D ekk e r, E. D., 54 n . Delusions. 3 1 Destructiveness (see Aggressiveness) Deutschland (by Heine) . 50 Disavowal . 43 Distortion. in religious doctrine. 44 ; Dream of Etruscan grave (Freud s) . 1 7 Dreams. wish-fulfilment in. 1 7 Dream-work. 1 7

Canni balism. 1 0 1 1 Childhood impressions. and instinc tual disposi tion. 9 Children (see also I nfantile) and paren ts (see Fa ther; Mother ; Oedipus complex ; Primal father) and religion. 47-8. 5 1 -2 development of super-ego in. 1 1 helplessness of. 1 7- 1 8. 23 4 . 3 0 • 49 instinctual impulses of. 10

Economic factors i n civilization, 6-7 . 10

neuroses of. 42-3 Christiani ty. 20, 38

61

GENERAL INDEX

62

Education, 8 9 , 47 g, 5 1 2 , 54 Einstein, A ., 3

Eros (see Libido; Sexual instinct) Ethics (see Morali ty) External world disavowal of, 43 man's control over, 49, 52, 55 6 religion and knowledge of, 25, 3 1-4 , 53

Fa te, 1 6 , 1 8 , 36, 50 Fa ther child's relation to, 30, 43 equated wi th forces of nature, 1 7 equated with God, 1 7 1 9, 2 2-4 , 30 , 4 2 , 49 fear of, 1 7 , 2 4 primal , 4 2 Fear, of t h e father, 1 7 , 2 4 Foucault, ]. B . L., 2 6

French Revol u tion, 46 Frustration of instinct, cultural, 1 0 Gi rls (see Women) God belief i n , 32 4 , 3 7 4 1 , 4 6 7 , 52 4 equa ted with father, 1 7 1 9 , 2 2 4 , 30, 4 2 , 49 Gods animal , 2 3 of antiquity, 1 7 1 9, 2 4

HallUcinations, 4 3 Hein e, 50

HeI plessness of children, 1 7 1 8 , 2 3 4, 30, 49 of man before nature, 1 7 1 8 , 2 2 4, 30, 49

Ideals, cul tural, 1 2 1 4 Identi fica tion , 1 3 1 4 Illusion, religious doc trine a s , 30 4 , 4 3 , 49, 5 1 -6 Immortal i t y , 1 9 , 2 8 , 30, 3 3 4 , 5 0 , 5 4 I ncestuous i mpulses, 1 0 1 3 , 2 3 Infan tile (see a lso Childhood; Chilo dren) sexuality, 3 1 Instincts (see a lso Sexual insti nct) dom inance of, 4 � ' 5 1 , 53 fru stra tion of, 10 in telligence a n d , 48-9, 5 1 , 53 pressure of civiliza tion on, 7 1 6 , 1 8 , 3 7 , 43, 50

repression and, 42-3 weal th and satisfac tion of, 6-7 I n telligence, primacy of, over in stincts, 48-9, 5 1 , 53 Jews, 19 Leadership, 8-9 Libido (see a lso Sexual instinct) narcissistic, 2 4 Love, sexual (see Sexual instinct) Masses, the and civilization, 7-9, 1 2 1 3 , 5 2 and religion, 3 7 9, 5 2 Messiah, the, 3 1

Meynert's amentia, 4 3 n . 3 Moira, 1 8

Monarchy, 4 8 n . 2 ' Monkey trial' at Dayton , Tennessee, 38 and n. 2 Moral ity and civiliza tion, \ 1 1 2 , 15, 1 8 1 9 and educa tion, 1 3

and religion, 1 8, 33, 37 8 Mother, and child, 24 'Multa tuli' (E. D . Dekker) , 54 n . Murderous impulses (see also Parri cide), 1 0- 1 2 , 1 5 , 2 3 , 39 42 Myths, 44 5 Narcissism, 1 6 and cul tural ideals , 1 3 1 4 Narcissistic libido, 2 4 Na ture, m a n and the forces o f , 1 5 1 9 , 2 \ -2 Neuroses (see a lso Obsessional neuro· sis) i n fan tile, 42 3 religion and, 42 4, 46, 53 Neuro tics, 1 0- 1 1 Object choice, anacli tic, 23 4 Obsessional neurosis, 43 and religion, 42 4, 46, 53 Oedipus complex, and religion, 43 Parents and children (see Father; Mother) Parricide, against primal father, 42 Parsi mony, 1 2 Pri maeval man (see a lso Primal father), 38, 42

GENERAL INDEX Primal father, killing of, 42 Primi tive races, 2 2 , lI8

Privation, instinctual, lO, r 6, 1 8 Prohibitions, cul tural, 1 0- 1 2 , 1 5 , 2 3 , 2 6, 40-2 , 48, 5 1 Psycho analysis, therapeu tic aspect of, 45

Reality principle (see Ex ternal world)

R e ik,

T . (see Bibliography)

Religion

and after life (see Immor tali ty) and civilization, 1 8-2 2 , 34-5 , 37 9 , 43-5 2 , 5 4 a n d education, 48-g, 5 1 -2, 5 4 a n d morality, 1 8, 33, 37-8 and obsessional neurosis, 42-4, 46, 53 and Oedipus complex, 4 3

a n d science, 3 8 -g , 5 2 , 55 as consolation , 32, 35, 49, 52, 54 as wish·fulfilment, 30- 1 , 3 5 , 4 2-3 , 52

j ustification for bel ie f in, 25-g, 3 2 , 37-8

origi ns of, 1 5-24

Reli gious d oc t ri nes , as ill usions, 30-4, 43, 49, 5 1 -0 Repression, 43-4 Robespierre, 46

R olland, Romain, 25 n. 3

Russia, 9, 46

65

Science and civilization, 6, 3 1 , 34-5, 37, 50. 54-0 and religion, 38-g, 52, 55 Sexual instinct (see also Libido) restricted by civilization, 1 5 Social aspect o f civilization, 6-7. 9. I I- I ll, 40-4 Spino%a, 50 n . Spiri tualism, 27-8

Stork myth, 44 5 Super ego, as internalized external a u ­ thority, I I

Tertullian, 2 8 n. Totem animal , 2 3 meal , 2 3 Totemism, 22-3, 42 U ncanny, the, 1 7 Vaihinger, H . (see a lso Bibliography), 30

Wealth, distribu tion of, 6-7 , l O , 1 2 , 21 Wish·fulfilment in dreams, 1 7 i n religion, 30- 1 , 35, 42-3 , 5 2 Women, intelligence o f, 4 8 Work aversion to, 8

dependance of civilization on, 6-8. l a , II